1It is often asserted that one of the most obvious differences between the British and French archivai Systems is that the latter is much more centralist in character and benefits from deeper and broader legal support. Ten years ago, a report compiled by national experts on the situation of archives in the twelve countries that then comprised the European Union concluded that “the National Archives of the 12 Member States, which on the face of it play a similar role in each State, have in fact been given markedly different roles”. Their jurisdiction does not invariably extend to all national administrative bodies; they have very varied responsibilities in relation to the archives of local authorities; and they are involved to different degrees in the management of current and semi-current records, only a small proportion of which are destined to become historical archives. The report placed France among those countries where the central archival authority exercises some control over local and regional archives. Not surprisingly, the more complicated situation in the United Kingdom required a separate paragraph to explain that Scotland and Northern Ireland have separate legislation and their own national record offices, and that local record offices in Scotland, England and Wales are all completely independent from the national archival institutions.2

2The original report has led to some productive co-operation among archivists at the European level in the area of electronic records management, and seems to have whetted the appetite of at least some British and French archivists for more of the same. In 2001 the recently retired Keeper of the Records of Scotland told a meeting of French archivists that “we have an absolute need for co-operation among us... Divided we will never amount to much; together, and with our allies in Brussels and Strasbourg, we will perhaps accomplish wonderful things”.3 In May 2003 the European Council of Ministers commissioned a further report on archives in the expanded European Union of 25 countries, to include the ten nations which became full members in May of this year.4 If the report – not yet published but expected soon – calls for more co-operative programmes among the European Union archivists, it will be important for all involved in running such programmes to take account of the significant differences in the archival Systems of each member State. In this way the dangers of an inappropriate uniformity, which ignores the diversity of historical and administrative traditions in the European Union, should be avoided.

3In 1936 the author G. K. Chesterton observed that “I love France: and I am glad I saw it first when I was young. For if an Englishman has understood a Frenchman, he has understood the most foreign of foreigners. The nation that is nearest is now the furthest away”.5 Applying Chesterton’s dictum, we might say that there is no greater challenge for a British archivist than to understand the French archival System. In 1978 an enterprising British archivist, with a specialist interest in 20^th century military archives, boldly rose to this challenge, only to receive a spirited riposte from the Inspector-General of the Archives of France, who thought that her published results “gave a somewhat sketchy and out-of-date picture of the conditions of access to archives in France. In order to clarify the matter... we think it necessary to State the present legislation and regulations on the subject”.6 Clearly, any comparative analysis of the British and French archival Systems has to be carried out with both caution and sensitivity.

4It cannot be denied that the legislative framework for archives in the United Kingdom appears rather feeble by comparison with the plethora of laws and decrees which exist in France. In 1983 the Public Record Office’s officer responsible for liaison with other archive services stated that “one distinguishing feature of archives administration in the United Kingdom is the absence of central control”. The Public Record Office Act of 1838, which first brought together under one new authority the records of central government, established no relation between the Public Record Office and local, ecclesiastical and private record custodians. The Grigg Committee, appointed in 1952, whose recommendations paved the way for the Public Records Act 1958, excluded from its enquiries records created by local bodies, nationalised industries and the courts of law. The terms of reference of the Wilson Committee on Modem Public Records, set up in 1978, were even more restricted in scope, covering only the workings of the 1958 Act in relation to selection and access.7 The Public Records Acts State that “public records” are generated only by central government bodies, the armed forces, and some, but not all, nationalised industries. This definition is, as we shall see, much narrower than that of “public archives” in France. To this day there is no definition of, or explicit protection for, private archives in primary United Kingdom legislation. However, the Royal Warrants exercised by the Historical Manuscripts Commission since 1869 have empowered that body to locate and describe archives of all kinds outside the public records, and to promote higher standards of preservation of, and public access to, these archives.

5The main legislation relating to local authority archives, the Local Government (Records) Act 1962, resulted from a private member’s bill rather than government action, and is permissive in character – the counties and county boroughs of the time were empowered to run archive services, not obligated to do so. Over twenty years later, a distinguished county archivist delivered the following scornful verdict on the 1962 Act: “in retrospect, what a poor thing it proved to be. In essence we could continue what we were already doing...”8 This modest legislation does not apply to Scotland, where local archive services outside the four largest cities only developed after reorganisation in 1975. The most recent reorganisation of local government in the mid 1990s, which established unitary authorities throughout Scotland and Wales and in parts of England in place of the old two-tier structure, was another opportunity missed to introduce any mandatory element in the provision of local archive services.9 By the end of the decade, it was calculated that there was a staggering variation of up to 500 % in the financial commitment which local authorities were making toward their archive services per head of population. The inevitable result was a growing gulfbetween the best – and worst – resourced repositories.10

6The British archivist can, therefore, be forgiven for casting envious glances at modem French archival legislation, which can trace its origins back to the 1790s and is certainly a model of clarity. The law of 3 January 1979 begins with a clear definition of archives as “documents, whatever their date, form and medium, produced or received by any individual person or legal body, and by any service or organisation, public or private, in the course of their activities”. This definition is accompanied by a ringing declaration that the preservation of documents is in the public interest in order to meet the requirements of management and to provide a justification of rights, as well as to provide source material for historical research (article 1). The définition of “public archives” is very wide, covering all documents which are generated by the activity of the State, local collectives, public establishments and enterprises, and private organisations carrying out a public service. Rather neatly, “private archives” comprise all documents which are not covered by the definition of “public archives”. The law also sets out the extended closure periods that apply to various categories of document which are exempt from the general rule of public access after a period of thirty years.11

7Personal and family papers are considered to be “private archives”, as well as the records of private companies, religious bodies, the press, trades union and private associations. Those private archives that are considered by the Minister of Culture, advised by the archives administration, to be of public interest for historical reason, are classified as “historical archives”. The destruction of classified archives is forbidden, their owner must notify the relevant archival administration if he intends to sell them, and, in the event of a public sale, the State may even exercise a pre-emptive power to purchase them if it is considered “necessary for the protection of the archival héritage” (article 20). On the other hand, nobody can access private archives without the agreement of their owner. If an owner transfers his collection to a public service, any conditions that he may lay down concerning their preservation and public access have to be respected. It is also problematic to classify a collection as “historical archives” if their very existence has not been established. For these reasons, the Direction des Archives de France has chosen to pursue a policy of negotiation and persuasion with private owners.12

8The follow-up decree of 3 December 1979 clarifies the role of the Archives nationales, which is charged with providing the entire range of professional archival services in relation to all documents produced by the central organs of the State, from the origins of the French nation onwards, and documents produced by all public bodies whose activities cover the whole of France. The archives départementales were tasked with carrying out exactly the same fonctions in relation to public bodies in their area.

9Although the law of 3 January 1979 was described at the time as “containing few innovations” during its progress through Parliament, it produced a delicate balance between the demands of historical research on the one hand and Personal freedom on the other, including the right to hold private property and to have certain facts relating to private life kept secret.13 Reviewing the effects of the law of 1979 and that of 1983 relating to decentralisation, the Inspector-General of French archives commented that “they have given more cohesion to the French archivai System and have contributed to a greater awareness of the importance and value of archives”.14

10So far no British archivist has been able to say the same about any piece of archival legislation in the United Kingdom. However, following the merger of the Public Record Office and the Historical Manuscripts Commission to form The National Archives (TNA) in April 2003, a public consultation about proposals for new national records and archives legislation was conducted, with an overwhelmingly positive response. The proposals would, if enacted, oblige central government and local authorities alike to create and manage their records, subject to standards issued by the relevant Minister on the advice of the National Archivist. They would also require local authorities to make some form of provision (not necessarily running their own archive service) for their historical archives.15 Even if these proposais all reach the statute book in due course, the records of significant parts of the public sector (for example, higher education) will still lack legislative protection, and there is also no intention to protect directly the archives of private individuals and organisations.

11Another obvious point of contrast between the National Archives in the two countries is their very different positions in the structure of government. The Public Record Office was, from 1838 to 1858, a non-ministerial government department under the aegis of the Master of the Rolls. In 1954 the Grigg Committee recommended that the Public Record Office should be subject to ministerial control, but did not express a preference.16 When the 1958 Act was passed, the Public Record Office was transferred to the Lord Chancellor because it was thought appropriate that a legal Minister should have oversight of legal records, which then accounted for a very significant proportion of the Public Record Office’s holdings. In 1992 the Public Record Office became an Executive Agency subject to the disciplines of business efficiency and corporate planning, while retaining its enduring status as a Government Department. Today The National Archives is a Government Department and Executive Agency under the Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs (an office created in June 2003) and Lord Chancellor. With the authority of a senior Cabinet Minister behind it, TNA has been able to develop its role as the provider of authoritative advice to other government departments on the management of current and semi-records.

12TNA’s position in central government is, however, not mirrored by the place of archive services in local authorities, many of whom now find themselves part of a cultural or leisure services structure rather than within a central administrative or legal function. For some observers it is the position of TNA, rather than that of the local archive services, which is curious and calls for further explanation. A distinguished archivist and former Board member of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council has recounted his own difficulties in this respect: “after eighteen months trying to explain to colleagues from the museum and library worlds why the Lord Chancellor has a view about archives... and why the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport has to mind his Ps and Qs, [my impression] is that it is like trying to explain the rules of cricket to a Mongolian and, judging from their expression, my explanation is just about as relevant and logical”.17 So the strengths that TNA derives from its position in central government, enabling it to make an informed selection of public records for permanent preservation, are not often replicated at local level.

13In France the archives départementales, under the wing of the secretaries-general in the prefectures since 1800, joined the Archives nationales at the Ministry of Public Education in 1884, but it was not until 1897 that the Keeper of the Archives nationales gained authority over all public archives in the country and received the title of directeur des Archives. The Direction des Archives became an autonomous body in 1945 and was placed under the authority of the Minister of Culture in 1959, where it remains to this day.18 It was most recently reorganized in 2002, and is responsible inter alia for a general inspectorate, national celebrations, professional and institutional networks, archival policy and inter-ministerial co-ordination, technological innovation and standardization. It exerts overall control over the activities of the Archives nationales itself, local, régional, hospital and communal archives. The Archives nationales has five components: the historical centre of the Archives nationales in Paris; the centre for contemporary archives at Fontainebleau, holding records created since 1958; the centre for overseas archives, consisting of the records of the former Colonial Ministry and the colonial governments, at Aix-en-Provence; the centre for archives relating to the world of work at Roubaix, holding the archives of business enterprises and associations; and the national centre for microfilm masters at Espeyran (Gard). Co-ordination between these components is provided by the directeur des Archives de France.19

14It would, therefore, appear that, because the direction des Archives exercises strong organisational control, it can permit a degree of geographical décentralisation of some aspects of its work. However, the archives of the Foreign and Defence Ministries are expressly excluded from its remit; both of these Ministries run their own records management and archive services. Other Ministries may run their own records management and archive services if this is agreed between the Minister concerned and the Minister of Culture, but these services remain subject to the oversight of the inspecteurs généraux at the direction des Archives. In 1982 this option was exercised by the Economics and Finance Ministry.20

15In the United Kingdom the historical archives of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Ministry of Defence and HM Treasury are all held by The National Archives at Kew. Although TNA has acquired comparatively few non-public record collections over the years and would now only do so in exceptional circumstances, it has a fairly complete official record of English and British central government from the Domesday Book of 1086 onwards. The only major pieces which are missing in this particular archivai jigsaw are the records of the India Office which, because they have been associated with a much larger collection that includes books, private papers, and prints and drawings, have now found an ultimate home in the British Library at St. Pancras. In recent years TNA’s status as the central repository for the records of United Kingdom Government Departments has been further enhanced by the transfer of historically significant material from the Security Service.

16The concentration of government records at Kew enables TNA staff to provide meaningful co-ordination when decisions about the selection of records for permanent preservation are being made in departments before their transfer to Kew, usually 25 years after the date of the first paper in a given file. This is done under the supervision of TNA client managers (formerly inspection officers) who work closely with the Departmental Record Officer (DRO) appointed by all public record bodies. The DRO is responsible for maintaining good record-keeping practices throughout his department. In effect, nearly all of the administrative work is carried OUT by staff supplied by the department, freeing TNA staff to exercise effective quality control. The essential elements of the review System, first recommended by the Grigg Committee in 1954, are still very recognizable in the review and appraisal procedures in place fifty years later.

17In 1990 the director of one of the French archives départementales carried out a review of the procedures for selecting historical archives from the mass of government records in place in different European countries. His comments about the arrangements in the United Kingdom were far from complimentary: “this System is guilty of certain imperfections: the records of services outside the central administrative structure are neglected; the frequent reorganisation of services throws the records into disarray; selections are delayed and the criteria for selection sometimes lack a scientific basis; it is sometimes very difficult to find motivated and qualified staff”.21

18 Since these criticisms – some of them also applicable to countries other than the United Kingdom – were made, TNA has brought much more intellectual rigour to its sélection policies. It has provided detailed guidance to departments on the keeping of key record groups, such as private office papers. From 1998, it has produced, in consultation with creating departments and public users, an overall acquisition policy for historical public records to be kept at Kew, a disposition policy setting out clear criteria for the distribution of other historical public records to local archive services and specialist institutions; and a raft of detailed operation selection policies relating either to particular departments or cross-cutting thèmes.

19In 1993 Jean Favier, then director-general of the Archives de France, observed that France now consumed as much paper every year as during the entire period of the Ancien Régime. In his view, the two main reasons were the growing intervention of the State in daily life, much of it prompted by its own citizens, and then the ready availability of paper photocopiers from the 1970s onwards.22 Similar pressures were of course at work in the United Kingdom, but the French response to them was very different. Since the early 1950s the practice has gradually developed of sending en mission permanente an archivist from the Archives nationales to each of the main ministries in order to oversee the selection and transfer of archives for permanent preservation. The third part of the decree of 3 December 1979 is entirely devoted to sélection and acquisition. It is very strong on distinctive French archival theory, setting out the three stages of an archival document’s life – its creation in an office and regular use; its occasional use for administrative purposes; and its selection for permanent preservation on account of its historical value or alternatively its destruction. However, although all public archives are placed under the control of the direction des Archives, there is no precisé description of the appropriate methods of intervention to be employed and nothing specifie is said about the missions. Before the setting up of a special section des missions in 1981, “archivists en mission acted as though they were individual soldiers, each of them trying to adapt as successfully as possible to the characteristics of the ministries for which they were responsible, Consulting if need be about a particular problem the eolleague who might have found himself in an identical situation”. Archivists carrying out this role often have to divide their time between several ministries, and their task is not made any easier by the frequent restructuring of ministries under the Fifth Republic, in contrast to the relative stability of the Fourth Republic. Missions are in effect an outside body implanted in the host ministry and their integration remains a fundamental problem. The lack of space and support staff to carry out administrative tasks often compels the archivists themselves to carry out the necessary work on most documents selected for permanent preservation. In 1983, the archivist then attached to the Ministry of the Interior summed up these arrangements as follows: “the French System is original because it combines the material centralisation of archives in the one large repository – the Cité at Fontainebleau – with the decentralisation of selection decisions taken in the very same places where the archives were created”.23

20Archives in France have also been affected by the decentralising policies of the Socialist Government in the early 1980s, which divided the country up into twenty-two regions. The law of 22 July 1983 transferred responsibility for communal, local and regional archives from central government to the corresponding administrative tier. In particular, archives in the départements, hitherto considered a service provided by the State, came under the authority of the présidents des conseils généraux, with effect from 1 January 1986. The new regional archive services have only processed records created by organisations attached to the regional councils, while the archives départementales have accepted the records of State bodies operating in, and on occasion beyond, their geographical area.24 In spite of these new decentralised structures, the directors of the archives départementales remain central government employees. However, new archive services, in the municipalities and at inter-communal level, have been set up, with a corresponding increase in employment opportunities. In addition, five universities in the regions, following the example of the University ofMulhouse,haveoffered potential archivists the opportunity to gain professional qualifications outside the long-established École des chartes in Paris.25

21In England, there are as yet no directly elected regional assemblies and, if they do eventually appear, their introduction is likely to be gradual and partial. However, the archive sector has over the last five years made immense efforts to catch up with their counterparts in libraries and museums by establishing representative bodies (called regional archive councils) from scratch and by making a full contribution to the Single Regional Agencies for the three sectors sponsored by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, a Non-Departmental Public Body funded by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.26 There are as yet, no regional archive services and the records of bodies with a remit covering several counties often find their way to the county record office nearest their headquarters.

22British and French archivists tend to view the international dimension of their work rather differently. In 1953 the then Deputy Keeper of Public Records felt that archival science had reached “a stage where international cooperation (was) both possible and valuable”.27 It is quite true that since then several eminent British archivists have played their full part in the work of the International Council on Archives. However, the United Kingdom does not use its archival heritage in cultural diplomacy in the systematic way that France does. There is a keen awareness that “France has for a long time been a beacon nation in the area of archival science [and], by the contribution of its expertise and the spreading of its capabilities to foreign countries, it continues to play a major role on the international scene”.28 These are not idle boasts: the directeur des Archives was the prime mover behind the setting up of the International Council on Archives in the late 1940s; its secretariat has always been based in the premises of the Archives nationales; the most recent revisions to its constitution will enable this arrangement to continue; and the present directrice is president of the International Council on Archives’s European branch. Every year it offers a ten-week training course to French-speaking archivists throughout the world, with some financial support being provided by the French Government. It has recently concluded bilateral agreements with Rumania and Egypt. As part of his statement of “a new policy in favour of archives” on 10 March 2004, the Minister of Culture and Communication drew attention to “the quality of international activity which is conducted in the archival domain and which contributes to the radiating influence of the Archives de France”.29

23On the occasion of the opening of the Channel Tunnel in May 1994, a French commentator observed that the contrast between centralist France and decentralist Britain was out of date because “the policy of cuts in public expenditure conducted for twenty years across the Channel and the decentralisation policy strongly implemented since 1982 in France have the effect of bringing both countries doser, of wiping out the distinction between the “feeble power” of central government in London and the “centralising power of Paris”.30 This statement may be considered something of an exaggeration and it would now have in any case to be revised to take account of devolution to the three other home nations and the policy of cautious regionalisation in England. However, it does contain at least a grain of truth. In the archival context we may note that in France there is a distributed pattern of responsibilities for the selection of modem historical archives in Paris, coupled with a moderate but distinct transfer of responsibilities from the capital to the new regions. In the United Kingdom, the writ of the National Archives runs in ail the major Whitehall departments; there are no separate ministerial archive services. In England the nationwide network of county record offices that sprang up after 1945 with very little encouragement from the centre has undoubtedly been weakened by a combination of local government reorganisation, restructurings within local authorities and budget cuts. Local archive services have, therefore, needed more guidance and support from the centre on a wide range of issues, including accommodation provision, electronic cataloguing, preparing for Freedom of Information implementation and, on occasion, strategies for survival. Since the 1980s the Public Record Office and Historical Manuscripts Commission have gradually risen to the challenge of providing more leadership for the archive sector, and this is now one of the top priorities of the newly unified National Archives.

24One recent survey of Anglo-French relations since the Norman Conquest concluded with the observation that “because of the history and geography which they [the two countries] share, they seem likely, whatever the future holds, to go on viewing each other with that mixture of resentment and respect that has characterised their relationship over the centuries”.31 I hope, but am not altogether confident, that in this paper I may have contributed more to the latter than the former.